This paper provides a solid introduction to the Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address depletion dilemma. The introductory section also contains many references to the various predictions that have been made over time. Interestingly, these predictions vary significantly, so one may wonder what prediction we will come to in, say, a year after the publication of this paper.

Section 3’s description of the experiment provides useful insight about the IP address allocation history of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) file transfer protocol (FTP) server. Generally, it would have been interesting if the paper had dealt with IP address allocation globally, as opposed to just in the Far East.

The paper presents a few thought-provoking approaches toward IPv4 address allocation. The experiments are well described and easy to follow. The conclusions are based on extrapolation and small-scale simulations (compared to the global IP infrastructure). It should be noted that IP address allocation may take different curves than those predicted in the paper.

The paper ends with a good description of required further work, with the hope that other researchers will continue where this paper ends.